Lit Mag is Strongly Rooted in Canadian Identity

A painting by John Harrington of the Victory Point inukshuk--one of those Inuit wayfinding and communication assemblages of stone that speckle the Arctic landscape--graces the cover of The Antigonish Review’s Winter 2017 issue. On the journal’s back cover is the familiar maple leaf and a certification that this is a “Genuine Canadian Magazine.” In between, the content lives up to these implied promises; apart from a few contributors hailing from places such as Alabama or Pennsylvania, France or Taiwan, both the issue and the magazine are strongly rooted in Canadian identity.

Fiction, poetry, poetry in translation, essays, and book reviews are on offer in issue number 188, which helpfully closes this volume, 47, of the magazine with an index to the previous year’s content, subdivided by genre. Helpfully, because the index shows that, while poetry, fiction, and reviews dominated the volume, only seven essays were published in the quarterly for 2016-2017. Nonfiction and creative nonfiction might therefore be a writer’s surest path to publication here.

The four reviews in number 188 examine a novel, a collection of short stories, a memoir/handbook hybrid by Carol Shields, and three poetry collections. Each is a thoughtful treatment of the work in question, with clever turns of phrase and sharp observations in their own right, as when David Hickey, reviewing Kim Trainor’s collection of poems, Karyotype, notes that “DNA is our age’s Great Chain of Being.” Contact the editors with a pitch if you want to review a book for TAR or if you would like the magazine to provide a review copy of a specific book.

Additional time in revision would have improved each of the five short stories in this issue. Several are plagued by an overreliance on verbed attributives. In these stories--four in the realist mode and one near-future dystopia--characters too often bark, mumble, poll, groan, moan, tease, opine, counter, snap, shriek, chuckle, explain, scoff, laugh, sigh, yell, huff, and joke their dialogue. A little of this goes a long way; in most cases, the sturdy and invisible “said” should be the go-to attributive. Even when “said” is chosen in these stories as the dialogue tag, there’s often an adverb grafted onto it, as if the writers are unwilling to let the dialogue stand on its own, so to speak, but must slip in a bit of emotional shading via “hastily,” “bluntly,” “nervously,” “apologetically,” “solemnly,” “brightly,” “abruptly,” groggily,” “incoherently,” “proudly” and so on. Again, a light hand is required or this becomes a distraction and an irritant.

Another syntactical choice that rapidly wears out its welcome is that of beginning sentences with dependent clauses and participial phrases. Most of the time the resulting sentences feel weak, often unbalanced--“Sifting powdered creamer into the coffee I offered, she laughs” is one example--and can on occasion imply a simultaneity of two actions that physically can’t occur at the same time, as in this sentence: “Barging into Mike’s office, I take my time crumpling the Globe article into a ball and place it carefully in the mess on his desk.” This sentence has its subject barging while also leisurely crumpling, two actions temporally at odds with one another. There also seems to be a glitch in parallelism, “placing” being the natural accompaniment to “crumpling.”

Of the two essays offered, one is hamstrung by use of the second person and too much narration at the expense of reflection, but the other, by MFA student Marcia Walker, honestly examines her family’s repressed style of communication. “My family’s coping mechanism of choice is selective amnesia. Or, more accurately, emotional evasion,” she writes in “The Language Spoken at Home” and proceeds to sift through and analyze the evidence--plentiful--of this mechanism in their reaction to her sister’s suicide attempt, her father’s leaving, twice, successive breakdowns by her mother and her other sister, and finally her own bout of what must have been depression. When, at a recent Thanksgiving years after all the drama has settled, she asks about the time her sister tried to kill herself all those long years ago and her family’s amnesia and denial spring back into action, Walker doesn’t seem surprised. Indeed, she makes the best she can of it, which is all any halfway successful family can do.

The poetry here is free verse, some stanzaic and some continuous in form, with most offering something--music, figurative language, diction that startles--to repay the reader’s time. Lee Firestone Dunne’s “Farmer on the Road to Saissac” captures the essence of a horse’s face with “mossy nose” and “bristly bone,” and in the persona poem “Horace Walpole Looks to Heaven,” Roger Caldwell’s wry lines, “I had never thought / I needed to be born, but when I found I was--well, then, I was forced to improvise,” seem perfectly suited to the old novelist, historian, playwright, and MP. Caldwell’s other poem in this issue, “Amazing But True (Number 93),” employs situational irony in a brief narrative of a Victorian music scholar who works years at reconstructing a long-lost score only to find said score after sending his reconstruction to press.

Huebert evokes a different era and a different art form in “Miss Transcanada” when he makes use of monster-movie ad language: “Cringe as she remembers / the Frankensteins that made her, / shudder while she recalls a time / before we sewed the rivers shut, / when roads were made of water. For music, Huebert’s second poem, “Season’s End, Revelstoke,” deftly mixes alliteration and consonance to describe a type of precipitation called “corn snow”: “All things skimmed in steeped-gold glaze.”

Poet and classical pianist Sue Chenette wonderfully uses an omniscient speaker and personification in “The Music Books at the Back of the Cabinet” to bring us this small drama in a piece of furniture. The eponymous music books, having “learned the long rhythm / of patience from trees branching / outside the music room window,” still hope to be of use to the woman who now and then dusts them. Meanwhile, inside the cabinet there is something of a hierarchy--a Merle Isaac Strong Techniques, “saved from an undergraduate course” can perhaps reasonably expect its own biblio-renaissance one day, whereas “The stapled photocopies of Armenian Songs / had modest expectations / especially after the woman gave up her flute / in favor of the piano.” And then there’s the quiet humor of “the optimism / of a snowy music-store afternoon” when the woman bought an Ernst Krenek piece in which “sixty-fourth notes vaulted / into leger lines.” Yes, good luck playing those. Through and around all this playful personification, Chenette gradually reveals bits and pieces of the woman’s life.

Do note that TAR only accepts snail mail submissions, the only exception being for writers who live abroad. And while the magazine pays--all too rare--fiction writers should know that this magazine does not accept simultaneous submissions and should decide whether or not they are sufficiently rich in time for one magazine to have an exclusive look at a story for the three- to four-month response window.